Turning the pages back...

April 16, 1822

Although the exact date of Dmytro Levytskyi's birth is unknown, the place is not in doubt - Kyiv. In 1735, the master engraver of the Kyivan Cave Monastery's Press, Hryhorii Levytskyi, was blessed with a son.

Trained by his father, Dmytro helped him decorate the Baroque St. Andrew Church on Kyiv's famous Uzviz in 1753-1756, and then moved to St. Petersburg to complete his studies in 1758.

In Moscow from 1762, Dmytro Levytskyi became much sought after as a portraitist of the aristocracy. At a summer exhibition in 1770, he won the St. Petersburg Academy's highest award and was inducted as a member. From 1771 to 1788, he taught painting there.

After a seven-year retirement during which he returned to Ukraine, he was called back to what was then the Russian capital, as the imperial court's official portraitist. Building on the Baroque, Classicism and Western European traditions, Levytskyi created a school of painting.

He executed over 100 portraits of personages such as the French encyclopedist and writer Denis Diderot (which now hangs in the Geneva Museum of Art and History), Empress Katherine II and Poland's King Stanislaus I Leszczynski. Dmytro Levytskyi died in St. Petersburg on April 16, 1822.

Source: "Levytsky, Dmytro," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 13, 1997, No. 15, Vol. LXV

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